Don’t Blame Trump for the Budget Debacle

President Donald J. Trump celebrates the passage of the Tax Cuts Act with Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan | December 20, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Blame the entrenched elites in the Republican party.

Trump proposed cutbacks, and plenty of them. The Republican elites voted against the President. Now deficits and debt are front and center topics of discussion. Let’s leave President Trump out of the discussion. The Republican party has been working against Trump from the day he formed his presidential campaign.

The party, not President Trump, is responsible for the failed effort to rid America of the Obamacare tragedy.

The party, not Trump, watered down the tax bill causing an enormous wasted opportunity.

Neither Democrats (sadly a worse option) nor Republicans stand for the American people and the constitutional republic formed by the founders (see Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson) in the original Articles of Confederation.

At The American Conservative, Margaret Menge explains some of the differences between what the President proposed for the budget, and what the elite Republican-led Congress gave him to sign:

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for 2018 was extraordinary, calling for a 31 percent cut to the EPA, a 29 percent cut to the State Department, a 20 percent cut to both the Department of Labor and the Department of Agriculture, and the elimination of funding for scores of things the federal government should never have been funding—many of them things Republicans have been promising to cut for more than 20 years, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

But Republicans in Congress last week ignored the president, allowing only modest spending cuts to agencies, and, unbelievably, refusing to cut defund the CPB, the NEA, and the NEH. This is infuriating and bewildering for those of us who have listened to Republicans complain about NPR for the last 20 years. The GOP even refused to accept the White House’s assertion that it needed an increase of only $52 billion for the Department of Defense, insisting on giving it many billions more.

You would think the road to ending taxpayer funding of at least the CPB had been paved, what with several top NPR staffers accused of sexual harassment in just the last few months, including the chief news editor, David Sweeney.

Trump’s budget had also eliminated funding for the U.S. Institute of Peace, the East-West Center, The Asia Foundation, the Inter-America Foundation, the African Development Foundation, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Green Climate Fund.

In open defiance of the president—and with the country $20 trillion in debt—the Appropriations subcommittee, led by Congressman Hal Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, kept money for most of these.

Trump’s budget had called for a 4.5 percent increase in defense funding, which amounted to $54 billion more than in 2017. It was the amount the Pentagon said it wanted. But Republicans in Congress insisted it take billions more—about 50 percent more.

What hope has Trump of ever reining it in? What hope is there for conservatism now that it’s given up on the one thing that supposedly held it together?